Looking Back on the Highs and Lows of 2018

Those were KnifeNews’s – maybe obvious – words at the end of 2017, looking forward to 2018. Obvious or no, the prediction came true. From January on, makers big and small kept surprising and delighting us with a seemingly endless string of knives as excellent as they were numerous. The knife industry seems to have hit that sweet spot where companies are large enough to streamline processes and reduce cost, but still small enough to lavish attention on details, finishing, and – most importantly – good design.

On a more positive note, the small batch production knife has became a juggernaut this year. As OEMs across the world become quicker and more capable, it’s now possible for a single person to produce the knife of their dreams and sell it directly to their customers. Boos Blades set the pace in this regard late last year, and we’ve seen Isham Bladeworks and Ferrum Forge, among others, take similar tacks. And of course 2018 saw the realization of a production model of Joe Caswell’s famous Morphing Karambit, which used popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to finance a similar project.

Coming in just under the yearly wire, so to speak, was Spyderco’s major change to their product announcement schedule. Rather than drop dozens of upcoming releases in a single mammoth product guide, they’ve switched to an ongoing reveal strategy similar to that adopted by Benchmade in recent years. Spyderco and Benchmade are two major trendsetters in the knife world so it’s likely we’ll see other companies switch to this tactic too.

It has been, and remains, a pleasure covering the knife world day by day. And the Readers’ Choice Awards gave voice to the most important aspect of the that world: its community. The knowledge and passion we see in our readers is both humbling and inspiring, and the entire team at KnifeNews wants to extend an enormous thank you to all of you who read our site and make this community what it is. And of course we want to thank our generous sponsor Work Sharp for helping us bring our vision of the Readers’ Choice Awards into being with style.

And in case you missed any of the awards, check out the complete list below for each of the ten announcements.

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KnifeNews delivers today's news for knife people like us. We report the latest news on new and popular knives, production knife companies, custom makers, innovations, and cover topics that are of interest to the knife carrying community.